January 15, 2009

The Morning Wrap

Late Night at The BLT: We had a few blog posts late Wednesday, all of which involved big news. Joe Palazzolo reports on the leading candidates for several top jobs at the Department of Justice, including heads of the Civil Division and the Civil Rights Division. Mike Scarcella reports on the newly revealed details of the whistle-blower complaint against an investigator and the prosecutors in the Ted Stevens case. And Tony Mauro reports on the Obama-Biden visit to the Supreme Court, where the incoming president and vice president met with eight of the nine sitting justices.

Previewing Holder: In advance of Attorney General-designate Eric Holder Jr.'s confirmation hearing, which is scheduled to begin today at 9:30 a.m., The Washington Post reports on his late sister-in-law's role in the civil rights movement. Vivian Malone Jones helped integrate the University of Alabama in 1963 and later worked at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. In a separate report, The Wall Street Journal quotes from Holder's prepared remarks for today, including this excerpt: "I made mistakes. ... But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see my errors clearly and I can tell you how I have learned from them."

Bush E-mails: A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge Wednesday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files, The Washington Post reports.

Record Settlement: In what would be a record sum for a corporate whistle-blower case, Eli Lilly is expected to agree as soon as today to pay $1.4 billion to settle criminal and civil charges that it illegally marketed its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, The New York Times reports. The company has been accused of a scheme to persuade doctors to prescribe the drug to two categories of patients—children and the elderly—for whom it was not federally approved and in whom its use was especially risky. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is prosecuting the case.

Faulty Fingerprint Work: Prosecutors in Los Angeles began a review of nearly 1,000 criminal cases linked to police department fingerprint examiners who falsely implicated at least two people in crimes, the Los Angeles Times reports. The review comes after the newspaper published stories critical of the work of six print analysts with the LAPD latent print section. One of the analysts has been fired.